Tech tips, mostly to do with Linux, Ubuntu, Grails, PHP, development tools and so on...

Sunday, 6 September 2009

Eclipse Opening Tutorial woes

I've been looking around for a good all around development environment for a while now and today I've decided to give Eclipse a go. I've installed the eclipse package from the Ubuntu 9.04 repositories and everything seemed to be working well. I was a little disappointed with the fact that the Ubuntu repositories only had version 3.2 of Eclipse, when the main stable release was at 3.5, but this didn't bother me too much.I opened up Eclipse and decided to have a go at the first two tutorials, hoping to get an idea of what this IDE's all about.

The first tutorial goes through the process of creating a Java project with the ambitious aim of printing out 'Hello World!' to the command line. Going through the tutorial was quite straight forward, teaching you how to create a new jave project and add classes to the project.

The second tutorial was the same as the first, except that instead of printing 'Hello World!' to the command line you would print it to a window. In order to do this you use the SWT by downloading the Eclipse project and making it a part of your projects runtime. The tutorial went fine until it came to running the code and I ran into the following error:

This is extremely disappointing. I mean, this is meant to be the second tutorial that the user works through, it should be bullet proof. The entry barrier to getting up and running on Eclipse should not be so high, that you have to go out of your way to learn the intricacies of SWT. So far, not a very good start for Eclipse.

Update: Got the second tutorial working. Instead of adding the SWT project off of the official site, I added the 'swt-gtk.jar' library found under /usr/lib/java on my Ubuntu install. Still not too happy about having to go to these kinds of lengths to get the first couple of examples up and running, but at least I'm learning :)